Saudi Coalition Airstrike Hits School Bus in Yemen, Killing Dozens

IBB, Yemen — An airstrike from the Saudi-led coalition struck a school bus in northern Yemen on Thursday and killed dozens of people, many of them children, local medical officials and international aid groups said.

The attack sent a flood of victims to overwhelmed hospitals struggling to cope in what the United Nations considers one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

The coalition said it had hit missile launchers and called the attack a “legitimate military operation,” but the attack and the justification for it were condemned and drew new attention to the tremendous human toll of the war in Yemen, especially on children.

“No excuses anymore!” Geert Cappelaere, Unicef’s regional director in the Middle East and North Africa, said on Twitter. “Does the world really need more innocent children’s lives to stop the cruel war on children in Yemen?”

The attack, in a busy market area, hit a bus carrying students on a recreational trip with a Quran memorization program. It killed at least 43 people and wounded 63, according to Muhammad Hajar, an official in charge of emergency services for the Health Ministry. He said the final toll could be higher because rescue operations were continuing.

Yemen’s conflict began in 2014, when rebels from the north of the country known as the Houthis seized control of much of the northwest, including the capital, Sana.

Saudi Arabia, which considers the Houthis a proxy force for Iran, and its allies responded with a military intervention intended to push back the Houthis and restore Yemen’s internationally recognized government.

Three years later, the war continues to grind on, and much of Yemen, which was already the Arab world’s poorest country, has been plunged into crisis, with poverty, malnutrition and diseases like cholera spreading.

The attack on Thursday took place in Sada Province, the Houthis’ ancestral homeland, which the Saudi-led coalition has bombed heavily since the start of the war, reducing much of it to rubble. It is also the area from which Houthi fighters frequently launch attacks on Saudi Arabia.

“Under international humanitarian law, civilians must be protected during conflict,” the Red Cross said on Twitter.

The head of the group’s delegation in Yemen, Johannes Bruwer, said it had sent supplies to the area to help hospitals “cope with the influx” of patients.

Saleh Jarban, the head of the Jumhouri Hospital in the provincial capital of Sada Province, also called Sada, said that 14 dead and 29 wounded had been brought to his hospital. Ten of the dead and at least 20 of the wounded were children, he said.

The rest of the victims had been taken to other facilities in the area, he said.

In a statement released by the Saudi state news agency, the coalition said it had launched airstrikes on missile launchers that had been used to attack the city of Jizan in southern Saudi Arabia, recently killing a Yemeni civilian there.

It called the attack “a legitimate military operation” and accused the Houthis of using children as human shields.

The strikes were “carried out in accordance with international humanitarian law,” the statement said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Saudi Coalition Bombs a Bus in Yemen, Killing Dozens of Children. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe